June 25, 2004

Harping back or harking back?

In an essay
in Spiked, Dolan Cummings critiques some critiques of critiques of the modern
world. He observes that these critiques of critiques all take the same rhetorical
stance: the complainers are accused of 'declinism', looking back to a golden
age that never existed.

He quotes from three anti-declinists, two of whom accuse their subjects of
of harking back to a mythical past, while one uses the term harping
back.

As he explains,

Leaving aside the question of whether one harps back
or harks back to a golden age, clearly it is considered a very bad
thing to do. The charge of utopianism works by portraying someone, often unfairly,
as a hopeless dreamer, but accusing opponents of nostalgia for a golden age
is an even dirtier trick. Not only are they deluded, but they are reactionary
too, dreaming of the past rather than embracing the future.

But here at Language Log, we won't leave aside the question of whether one
harps back or harks back. First Google:

whG

whG

harp back to

897

hark back to

27,200

harps back to

592

harks back to

41,800

harped back to

109

harked back to

7,390

harping back to

600

harking back to

29,800

TOTAL

2,198

106,190

So writers on the internet hark back about 48 times more often than
they harp back. And a good thing, too, because that's the historically
sanctioned idiom.

As the OED explains, hark back comes from a cry used to get the attention
of hunting dogs, and if you want, you (or rather the dogs) can hark away, hark forward, hark
in, hark off, or hark on as well.

hark, v.
4. intr. Used in hunting, etc., as a call of attention and
incitement, esp. in conjunction with an adverb directing what action is to
be performed: hence denoting the action .

b.hark back.
Of hounds: To return along the course taken, when the scent has been lost,
till it is found again; hence fig. to retrace one's course or steps;
to return, revert; to return to some earlier point in a narrative, discussion,
or argument.

1829Sporting Mag. XXIV. 175, I must ‘hark
back’, as we say in the chace. 1868 HOLME LEE B. Godfrey xli. 225 Basil must needs
hark back on the subject of the papers. 1877 CRUTTWELL Hist. Rom. Lit. 223 The mind of Lucretius
harks back to the glorious period of creative
enthusiasm. 1882 STEVENSON Stud. Men & Bks., J. Knox 349
He has to hark back again to find the scent of
his argument. 1895 F. HALL Two Trifles 31 To hark
back to scientist..I am ready to pit it against your agnostic.

First, like any other eggcorn, it's very similar in sound to the original.
Second, there is probably some resonance of the phrasal verb harp on,
which the AHD defines
as "To talk or write about to an excessive and tedious degree; dwell on."
Many of the eggcorn examples use harp back to refer to someone's complaints
about something, which might well be described as harping on it as well
as harking back to it:

If ever you get a tiresome old relative harping back to the good old days...
These people lament the coming of the backpacker age, harping back to the
sixties and seventies when you had to drop out of society to get on the trail...
Even when Grahame wrote it he was harping back to a time that he missed...
He made no new concessions and harped back to "bold steps" he had
taken and India's non-response to them.
It is still very much harped back to because it was the first and the only
full study of what was needed...